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Sugarcoded

By Koobie Wyatt

Copyright 2017 Koobie Wyatt

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Chapter 1

You
know, gran is such a bullshitter.

There she
sits at the head of the table waving her fork around, saying the most
outrageous things. Here comes another one now.

Years ago,
so she reckons, years ago before even mum and dad were born, they all
thought the world was going to end. Everyone was going to be blasted
to dust and shadows, and that would be the end of that. So she says.

But it
never came. Their final day never happened. There was no blinding
flash. Nobody's skin was fused to nobody's bones. Leastways, not
until Murmansk – and that was when I was a little kid, you
know, like six or so decades on from the main event. And it had been
a total accident, too. Fucking thing wasn't actually pointed at
anyone when it went off, yeah? I mean, there was no target or
anything. Dad thinks they were just cleaning up, but what does he
know? So poor little Murmansk was no big deal really, not compared
to what gran is talking about.

Millions
may die any day now, says dad, when the earth gives way and LA falls
in on top of itself. Or maybe Istanbul.

Bad times,
dad. Real bad times. I grin, becoming ever more excited by all this
talk of destruction and death. Tell us more, gran! Tell us more!

Hayla, my
cyst, my big blister, hushes me up and reaches right across the table
completely uninvited. Still heaps left on my plate I have, but it
isn’t for her greedy face. At least not yet. Not whilst it’s
still warm.

Dad snaps
at her, which makes a change.

I just
can't picture it, you know, gran marking time like that, all
paralysed and trembling before the Almighty Bomb as if before God.
No shelters were deep enough to hold a future for any of them, she
says, and no real future to speak of other than those last four
minutes. So together they would hide and huddle in the long grass,
gran and her happy friends – just a bunch of kids like you and me –
their bright summer days tainted by this one stark certainty, scaring
one another shitless with tales of fallout and lingering death, of
still births and running sores. Were their treasured, radiant lives
to count for nothing?

I shake my
head. I really do. Nuclear war really must have been the most
serious kind of mindfuck to try to stare down when you're so young.
I know I couldn't have handled it. And that's the truth.

At least
not without my wire.

Why didn't
your parents send you down the mall, gran? Just pop some coin in
your pockets and send you shopping or something? That's what ours
do! (Or what we ourselves choose to do when none of us is able to
face up to what we should be facing up to.)

It all
seems laughable to me here and now, sixty some odd years distant from
gran's mutually assured nightmare. You know, tucked up safe and
sound and completely in the clear. But the minute I start to openly
chuckle and stuff, incredulous at the enormity of it all, gran takes
it totally the wrong way and comes on dead stroppy with me. That's
when she starts cranking out that you-young-people cliché of hers,
cutlery poised. Liberteens, I say, correcting her yesteryear
way of speaking in a teasing, grandsonish sort of way. The youth of
today, gran perseveres, the youth of today have neither the grace nor
the wisdom they think they have. They're only interested in what's
on the outside. Proofs not truths. (She says all this as if
I’m not there, yeah?) They are unable to see or fear the true
nature of anything. For them there is no danger. No danger in
anything at all.

By now the
top of her voice is echoing loud in mum's ears from Sunday lunches
long gone, when someone older and wiser and totally unknown to me
used to sit in gran's creaky carver. Written all over mum's face it
is, grim as grim. I'm just having a bit of fun, you know? I don't
pretend to understand.

Why, asks
gran, why are we so eager to throw our lives away so uselessly, so
easily, so unlived and unfulfilled? (She's seen it on the telly, so
she has.) And is it really so very many...?

Don't
point with your knife, mother. It's rude.

It's all
the reply she gets. For a mouthful or two there's a lull, then up we
rise again for an argument about genetics, about ordained destiny,
which gran doesn't believe in at all, and about heavensight, in which
I don't believe but big blister does. Hayla ignores me when I say
it's all big laughing bollocks, and reassures gran in a
grand-daughterish kind of way that genetics is something she will
have very little understanding of because she didn't have to learn
about it at school back in the day. Unlike us. And then gran
comes back all wild-eyed and proud, drumming hard at her bony chest,
proclaiming she was born the year DNA was first well and truly
unravelled. Which I am sure must be a lie. But like who knows?

Gran is
making us giggle again and has to bang the table to shut us up.

Oh, come
on, gran – you know you're not the punchline!

But our
facetiousness is becoming tiresome to her and a weary look of defeat
passes across gran's face. She retreats to her food visibly reduced
in size. Poor gran. Hayla and I can't keep a serious train of
thought going for more than five seconds, she ought to know that. I
know I wind her up more than I ought, and far more than she deserves,
because I really do love listening to what gran has to say.

Poor mum
and dad, look at them. Becalmed in the middle as usual. They've
heard all this about a thousand times before: the appalling contrast
between their children’s lives and those of the generation
preceding their own. And no one is the slightest bit interested in
anything either of them has to say, that’s for sure. Recent
history is the most contemptible form of history, after all.

Our world
on the other hand, our world is now so gloriously bounding, bright
and wondersome that gran's commonplace recollections are a
strangeness to be savoured. And they're funnier, too. They spank
dad's cheesy old nostalgia any day. Listen.

Things
were so downright primitive when gran was my age, yeah? Ten
times unbelievable, some of it. What she comes out with sometimes,
it floors me absolutely. All the way down. I mean, if you simply
deleted ten or so things from my life – really essential things –
that gran didn't even have back in the Sixties when she was a girl, I
can't imagine how I'd, you know, how I'd cope. Function. Whatever.
Sorry, I know I'm going to collapse at the total pathetickness of it
all long before I get to the end of gran's woeful and like homeless
kid list, but here goes. Straight face and no violins.

In her
house there was:-

- no
phone (roamer or otherwise)

- no
computer (which I kind of knew anyway)

- no wet
room (just a cold steel bath, the very idea of which gives me the
shivers on account of the giant hairy fucking spiders)

- no
central heating (can you believe, the first thing gran had to do when
she arrived home from school was to make an actual fire – by
hand, with paper and coal!)

- no
fridge

- no
dishwasher

- no
washing machine or tumble drier

- no
microwave (everyone’s houses must have smelled of cabbage and eggs,
yeah?)

- no
music system (well, just this manually operated effort, sort of like
a meat-grinder, which played things about the size of a family pizza
– and with an actual needle for Christ's sake! – I mean,
I'd die without constant music: I've always got at least one
earbug in, even at the dinner table, like now for instance)

- no chip
DV or even that crappy video thing that dad brings down from the
attic every once in a weepy while

- and –
get this; this is deluxe – a monochrome box television set
made of wood, on legs with just three channels
and no broadcasts during the daytime. I mean, what on earth did
they do when it rained? Play miserable little dice games?

Gran's
impoverished life didn't end there. There was more. Plenty more.

Until she
flew off on her honeymoon, gran had never been abroad or on an
airliner in her life (I've been on twenty, minimum). And in those
days glow and pollen were still totally beyond law (though that's no
bad thing if the question's being asked). And, if you can believe
it, there was only one place in town you could actually buy a burger:
in a real life restaurant, all brown and scarlet plastic inside with
waitresses to match. Nasty. Gran says you honestly had to sit
down and eat it with a knife and fork – bun and fries
and all – like it was a serious meal or something.

And then
gran tries telling us there were no shopping malls at all. Not a
single one in the whole damn town – in any town – just
sort of ranks of uncovered shops along either side of a cold and
windy street. She reckons browsing used to mean going into each one
of these sad places in turn to see if you liked what was on offer.
There were no pop-ups, no persuasive virals or auto-calls, no
man-to-man marketing or anything. I mean, there was no pressure.
It cracks me up. It really does. No mall! Sounds worse than
nuclear winter, yeah gran?

But of
course it has to sour. It always does. We've been sitting there
nearly a couple of hours, having a wonderful laugh over mild curry
and light wine, me and mum and big cyst, dad and gran together, when
the rain starts to hit hard against the window. It’s not my fault.
It’s not my fault, yeah? The whole afternoon falls right out of
the sky because gran's had too much to drink – like she always does
– and then dad has to go and mention the etherworld. My
netherworld. Oh, great! Like thanks, dad. So now she's having a
right go at me for being hardwired and stuff, and how I'm sure to
kill myself before I'm twenty and had children of my own. Sure,
gran. Sure. What’s the problem?

Out of the
blue mum sticks up for me, though kind of half-heartedly, saying it's
just another phase and I'll give it up soon enough. It's more to
mollify herself than her mother really. Then the big bloater parked
opposite contradicts mum right out by saying that the hardwire's evil
and stuff and beyond law and I shouldn't be doing it ever and
why don't you put Cal’s name down on one of those new head
transplant lists or something if you’re that worried?

He’s
already had it shrunk.

Fuck off,
dad!

My turn to
bang the table. Plates are cleared and silence grows. Sphincter
muscles tighten. Bowls of dessert appear. It only remains for dad
to start persecuting me, which he does, as soon as mum is out of the
room.

I listen
to a couple of minutes of this rubbish of his masquerading as
dazzling perception, before waving it all away and making to leave
the table. I don't have to put up with this shit I don't, not for
one minute. I tell big blister she's welcome to my pudding. Only
dad has to restrain me from shoving it all down her fat front when
she makes to flick half a teaspoon of pale pink goop at me and chirps
all sarcastic, don’t forget Andrena's portion!

I've had
enough. I stomp upstairs.

Why do
they have to get on at me like that? Why can't they just let things
glide and ride? Why can't they just accept? I don't do bad
stuff. You know, bad stuff to other people, stuff to harm the
general population. And all my key performance tests come back fine
or thereabouts, term after term, so what's the big fucking deal?
Anyway, life's not a bottomless pit, is it? So what if I throw
myself in as hard and as far as I can? They know it's what most
liberteens end up doing. What's it got to do with any of them,
anyway? It’s my fucking life! Andrena understands, thank God.
I'd go mad without her. I really would.

I slam the
door.

Dolts.
Why do we bother with them? They squeeze us into this world of
theirs and then spend forever complaining because the rails they’ve
set us on are never ever quite straight enough. You know, one pesky
micron off true. Always we come toppling off and they make such a
big fuss and flap of setting us right back on them again. There we
go! they say. Right as rain. Pat-pat. Good as new.

Right as
rain, my arse. Dolts.

Alone in
my room I lie down on the floor and jack the wire in behind my ear.
The countback is set at four. Just a little one. Just enough to
flush the stress out of my system, to block out the sound of gran
crying below. There was a time when they would have chased me up the
stairs, shouting at me, pleading with me. But not any more.

I smile.
Andrena understands. So what more do I need?

Green
lights flicker at my mind's horizon. I hit the switch and a golden
light receives me. I am welcome.

Chapter 2

Waiting,
waiting, waiting. Sick of this waiting room I am. Horrible fug of
air fresheners and cleaning products. Magazines all dog-eared and
dead. Not even any good pictures in them. Look at this one here:
how old is it, for God's sake? Great big words proclaiming a
stardust empire for the whole of mankind, all bold and crowish above
a phoney image of some astronauts struggling to raise a flagpole.
Bunch of wankers and no mistake. Two years left at school I have and
still they haven't reached Mars. Dolts!

I know
we're supposed to look up to them and everything, but our elders and
betters are such an utter disappointment, aren't they? And like
every time, too. Without fail. And it's all because of them I've
been harbouring these dangerously high hopes and expectations, for
years and years. Totally embarrassing really. I blame them
entirely, all of them, without exception, for making me feel how I
do. And these scientists, yeah? Their idea of a cosmic breakthrough
is to toss up a probe in that direction every once in a while and
stir up some dead orange dust. Awesome, as dad would say. It
doesn't even make the news.

Space
sucks. It really does. Endless void full of junk and urine
crystals, that's all it is. Time was it used to be exciting and
stuff looking up at the stars, dreaming and wondering. Like back
when I was a little kid, maybe, all eager for dad's promises to come
true. One day, he'd say, one day there'll be this magnificent glass
and aluminium colony of frontiersmen up there somewhere. Heroes to a
man. And he'd get me all bouncy and gleeful about rockets with fiery
tails, things like that, and how I'd get to fly in one. Some day.
But it doesn't excite me now. Not any more.

Nowadays I
don't hear dad one way or the other really: I'm channelled into a
very different kind of space – the space between my ears. The
universe of my very brain! My heart churns white hot just thinking
about it. All those on/off switches set to ignite me – and about a
billion others – entwined across the ether every night.
Personally, I'm aware of another three besides myself – Dil,
Erle and Andrena – my friends, yeah? But we are most definitely
legion. No question. Oh, and there's another one just down our
road, a post-grad veggie loser, almost as old as dad and completely
dirty. I don't mean sex dirty; I mean filth dirty, disgusting dirty
like totally unwashed. Grins and shows me yellow teeth. Doesn't
shave or shower and probably almost certainly stains his own
clothes. Never has, you know, clean hangings or makes time to frig
with his hair or anything. Just sits and smokes and looks greasy,
with wormcasts all over his face. You wouldn't want to touch him
even briefly, even by remotest accident. I mean, the guy’s a
fucking maggot. Great brain, mind you. Just that Koel's in the same
drecky garb day after day, week after week. Like dressings off an
old wound they are. Criminal shame, because Koel really understands
the inner distance. He can sort of hold your hand in the ether and
show you ways and means you'd never dreamt of, corners of brilliance
you'd never so much as even think were there. Shame it had to
take a guy like him to show me, to humble me.

None of us
has seen Koel about much lately though. Or felt his presence. For
months come to think of it. Which makes me ten times more wary than
normal. I bet he's boiling up something real creepy. Like I get the
feeling he's always looked upon me as some kind of mud-sucking
apprentice or somesuch, for him to direct or manipulate or whatever.
All for him and him alone. Well, he can fuck off as far as the eye
can see. Totally sick-making. One of these days I'll tell him to
back right off, freaky boy! Which won't be easy, because there's all
this history between him and me. Not that I want to talk
about that right now. Ok?

Maybe I'd
like a disciple or whatever, too, yeah? A little follower, a fellow
traveller. That would be cool. Someone whose eyes I could open,
wider and yet wider! But I guess I'm still too fresh and a little
lean on real knowledge to be of any use to anyone just yet. And I
don't want to lose anyone in the ether, now do I? Know what I
mean? Oh, but maybe you don't know what I mean! Or know
where I've been, where I'm going, this evening or whenever.
Don't you download or watch the wall-to-wall? Surely you do! Like
nobody doesn't, these days. Unless they're another dad,
another sad and slo-mo infotainment junkie dad, all receding and
tiresomely twentieth century, just filled to the brim with the
printed word and stuff. Yeah, go on, dad, tell us all about your
collection of classic plastic bottles. That’s it. There’s a
good lad.

I can scan
dad's boring grey hole of a universe in no time at all. Less than no
time. Crap, the whole of it. No use to anyone. Not compared to my
domain. Not like ether incognita. In mists divine.

Sometimes
I make a real effort and try to reason with dad: like what about
stims and tranks, dad? They're all ghostmakers, too! You know, like
the purple and greenies gran has to take? But back he comes all
scoffy and everclever with like come on, Cal, it's not the same, now
is it? You know that. It’s not the same as screwing around with
what's inside your head, all those rusty, leeching wires raking at
your brain, poisoning your blood and juices, your mind quietly
suppurating. Just think about it for a minute! And then I tell him
he's completely ignorant and a philistine because he's never even
been there, so he doesn't know. He wouldn't appreciate
the damn thing anyway, would he? Dolt and never once young in his
life, if you know what I mean. So how could he know?

Honestly,
dad has never been hardwired, not even when it was the newest thing
to emerge, the greatest thing ever to reach out to us from the global
grid – not even just the once out of wholesome curiosity – back
when I was six or seven or something. (Dad probably peaked with air
hockey or maybe the driverless car – know what I’m saying?) I
mean, everyone was into it. It may have been completely basic
back then, but at least it was reversible. Too big a mindstep
for him I suppose, poor thing.

I can't
imagine turning down such an opportunity, such a fantastic
exploration like that though. I really can't. But it takes no great
leap of the imagination to picture dad just standing there, palms
pushed forward in typical, safe self-denial, if ever the offer were
made. Which I seriously doubt it was. When all's said and done,
dad's just a voyeur.

What for
me was the most momentous event in human history was for him little
more than an interesting phase in the corporate evolution of
AngelTech, before they went bust.

Okay, so
being hardwired used to do those things he says, well, some of
them anyway. But most of what you hear nowadays is just scary media
shit trafficked by dolts jealous of what we liberteens are doing in
private with our most beautiful beautiful filaments. Sure my folks
know I sneaked an inquisitive go or two back then, and that I do it
now. Habitually. They know I'm hooked and happy. Won't see a
happier teen in our street! And clever with it. Clean, charming and
clever as fuck. And a total wirehead. I let them deal with
the fear. No fear in me. Not so much as a whisper. Not a breath.

I hear my
name. Time to go in.

The man at
the back has a question. Cal, my boy, what exactly is hardwired?

This kind
of dumb flapping around in the dark is precisely why I maintain with
dad that everyone should be unhinged all day every day, with just a
few observers like watching over us as we cascade over one another in
the cerebral cosmos, kind of guardians to dab at the corners of our
mouths every now and then as we smile and drool in like =SUM(Human
Existence), yeah? Sounds like a load of trippy drug hero bollocks,
doesn't it? But when you've been there you just know it
isn't, because it's so pure and instant and always and
beautiful and everything all at once. Enlightenment and
release and love and God and happiness all down the one wire. You
know, The Answer. Everything worth knowing.

And so as
to leave you in no doubt, being hardwired has absolutely nothing to
do with chemicals whatsoever. Pharmageddon is utterly yesteryear and
beyond. You know, blowing your mind apart with microglycerine and
all that stuff. Garbage in, garbage out, that’s what I say.
Christ, I'd rather talk to my cyst than ingest any of those dull
neuro-toxins cooked up by some scabby, failed chemistry student. As
for hallucinations – sorry, I mean mere hallucinations –
compared to our higher ethereal state they're just abbo and burn bad
as sulphur right behind your eyes, in that special, guarded place.
I'd rather watch wall-to-wall, yeah? And I never watch
wall-to-wall. Except maybe when I'm snacking or there's an
overground to catch in like ten minutes time and there's just no
point in starting anything major.

Anyway,
the sap at the back still has his hand up. Like sorry, okay?

As a
speckish point of reference, being hardwired is the physical
condition of having the sweetest of cerebral implants, usually behind
the left ear, because it's the left hand side of the brain which
responds best in most people. Don't rightly know why. Look it up!

When
people first started toying with implants, say, ten or eleven years
ago, they were made of copper and surgical steel. Unfortunately,
these prototypes were full of imperfections, all pitted and easily
contaminated or corroded by cranial fluid; that's why so many ended
up with sep or hep or both. Hadn't been properly sterilised or
product-tested, yeah? Or the clowns were actually sharing
them. Can you imagine?

Anyway,
these days they are sheer perfection. There's still a hollow
stem about twenty-five millimetres long, only these new ones are
fashioned in hardened gold, because (a) it's micro-electrically
conductive, and (b) it's tissue inert. No different to earrings or
nose studs or whatever your mum's got in her flaps, yeah? Anyway,
that's the port, the door, the bridge where you plug yourself in via
the universal mute plastic box; yes, the one onto which all your
dreary courseware is loaded. Standard glasswire output, slim black
jack with a male end. Pretty low tech when you think about it. The
really masterful bit is the swish of ultrafine titanium hairs,
hundreds of them, the surface of each barbed along its entire length,
I guess to prevent them drifting around in the squishy stuff between
your brain and your skull. Or for better and more extensive contact
with the outer synapses, perhaps? Small wonder an implant is
sometimes spoken of as a fern. It also has a clunky medical name as
long as Sunday, but like who cares?

I heard
somewhere that the early ones looked kind of (and probably were)
ex-military, with about half a dozen strands protruding, thick as
domestic fuse wire. You know, a bit like a detonator. Frankly, I'm
surprised those who pioneered the technique got any response at all
using hawsers like those. Equally, I'm not surprised so many died.
But I try not to think about that, nor remind myself I'm little more
than a walking time and space bomb myself, as big blister so often
delights in telling me. Coma’s gonna get you, little bro! Well,
she can go swivel.

Looking
back to only this time last year, now that definitely was the
hardest part of all. Having the actual implant. Not the operation,
yeah? But waiting and waiting for my time to come and having to
constantly explain away my excess agitation as nerves about giving a
stupid presentation at school or something.

The whole
thing was carried out under local anaesthetic, so I didn't feel a
thing. The surgeon made three quick incisions, flicked the tiny
triangle of flesh from the end of his scalpel into a cashew-shaped
dish, and delicately trepanned his way through the bone. No sooner
had the drilling stopped than he planted the fern, fronds first; a
quick twist and that was that.

I didn't
watch mine being done in a mirror or anything, I just asked if I
could watch Erle having his done and the bloke said sure. They gave
me a gown and a face mask and everything. How cool is that?

Recuperation
takes longer than for your average teen boob job, though the cost is
about the same. Four thousand, maybe five. Depends if you want to
jump the queue. Which, of course, I most certainly did.

What you
are and what you want, eh?

Afterwards,
you have a sore head for days and days, all raw and scratched inside.
Weirdest feeling. And until the vivisector's hangover subsides
completely you cannot, must not plug in. Your brain would
just overheat and turn to mush. I lived on analgesics for a month.

When our
time came, me and Erle bunked off school for a week. Like I said, we
had it done together. And because it's completely beyond law here in
this country, and has been for several years easy, we had to go to
France, to Paris. All those sly doctors who’d been making a small
fortune on the quiet, after hours, set up their new dirty little
clinics around the Gare du Nord, yeah? Like they’d all just rolled
down the tunnel, flopped off the train and set straight to work.
Nobody bothers them there! Koel says he flew back to Cape Town to
have his done. Which is where he comes from. He reckons he could do
his own, too. Tosser.

Now, once
you have it done they make it so it's completely irreversible, just
like the tiny tatts Andrena keeps hidden beneath those lush woolly
tights of hers. My only darling. Surgeons can't yet figure a way to
remove all those thousands of hooks without causing a stroke or brain
damage or some other cubist facial feature palsy, not even the
ethical ones. But when the gene is your driver, what does it matter?
Nothing matters. Except being there. You know, in mists
divine.

The man at
the back has another question. Where does a complete ingrate like
Cal get five thousand from?

Now this
is something my parents haven't forgiven me for. Gran
neither. That I walk the city like some proto-cyborg straight out of
a really bad film, that's cool, because one way or another they
always kind of knew I'd end up hardwired. It's what I've always read
about and crapped on about. It's what I've always wanted.
But off-loading several grand's worth of treasured family heirlooms
whilst they were away on holiday some ghastly place with ten pools
and free booze and insects and fuck all to do worthwhile, well, I
really got doused in nitric for that. I removed the photos and other
sentimental crap from the drawers first, mind, and all the
legal-looking stuff. I'm not a total shit. Besides, the stuff was
insured I guess. And liberteens are driven to doing this kind of
thing all the time, aren’t they? So really they shouldn't have
been that shocked.

Anyway, in
exchange for half a carrier bag full of red, brown and blue banknotes
I left our front door unlocked for maybe an hour or so and let all
the best pieces walk, although at the time I really had no idea what
would be carried off. Or whether or not they would shit on the
carpet. It’s just a risk you have to take.

I tell
you, for about a day I felt well and truly minted.

The people
who did it were from over Andrena's way I should reckon. Dil’s
dodgy friends most like. I must say though, I was astounded and fair
mystified by their taste. All of our state-of-the-art wall-to-wall
gear they left well alone – the high end satellite uplink stuff –
and lifted the bloody furniture instead. All of it. Including my
chrome bed! Paintings and tacky china creatures, too. No sense of
value at all, some people. Still sleeping on the floor I am, but no
matter. Small price, I reckon. And I still have my favourite pillow
and a couple of old crash mats from when dad once forced us all to go
camping. Somewhere by the sea. With ants. About a thousand years
ago.

So now I
have my wire.

At the
time I honestly didn't care, because I was so obsessed with reaching
sixteen and totally fixated on this one single outcome, yeah? But
when the wind blows from the wrong direction I get glimpses of my
parents' point of view and I relate to their loss and sympathise and
stuff. Which isn't often.

Anyway,
once they figured my head was nailed back on straight and I’d
agreed to come here once a week for a bit of counselling and
displacement therapy, mum and dad extruded this flimsy promise out of
me to repay them in some way. When I'm grown up, of course, and a
true dolt just like them.

You're
bright! (they said.) There's a great future ahead of you! (they
said.) You've got so much to live for...!

I
swallowed their smiles and absorbed their squeezes of encouragement.
And all the time I’m thinking, like yeah? Like I'm gonna toil my
life away like you do? Oh sure. Anyway, this is my final
session. Thank God.

Coming!
Ready or not!

Chapter 3

As soon
as I woke up this morning, I knew that at some point during the day I
was going to have one of my nosebleeds. I’d got totally wrecked
the night before hardwiring with Dil, so it really was kind of
inevitable.

Dil blows
his mind deliberate: you know, spends way way too long in the ether.
Half an hour and I'm dog food. You've got to be some kind of gonzoid
grandmaster or somesuch other lunatic – like Dil – to immerse
yourself like he does for hours on end. (Dil’s motto is too
much is never enough.) I'm surprised he still retains the powers
of speech and balance, let alone reason.

As usual I
went round to Dil’s place when the wall-to-wall started in with its
daily hour of greed shows and the early evening mini-soaps –
Beefcake Luvs Cheesecake and all that rubbish. I'd fully intended
catching up with Andrena and Erle for homework and stuff, but somehow
it never happened. Know what I mean?

When Dil’s
mother, LizMary, opened up I knew instantly where the boy was at.
She hollered up the stairs that that useless string of protein Cal
was here and waiting, and when no answer came, she smiled widely and
stepped aside. I went on up.

There was
no point knocking not even out of mock politeness, because when
you're hardwired the outside world is another dimension entirely.
Literally. And as far as Dil was concerned, had he been aware of me,
that's exactly where I was.

The door
to Dil’s room had to be opened real gentle though. There was a
significant danger that any clumsiness on my part might wrench the
fibre optic out of its socket, and that would have sent Dil into
shock or something just as horrible, all twitchy and messy on the
bedroom floor. Can’t do it wireless for the same reason. Someone
next door uses a tv remote and bang! you’re pangolin stew. Anyway,
Dil was out of harm's way amid a moraine of old clothes, comatose and
serious-looking, way and away. I sniggered and called him a lucky
sod.

Dil’s
hardware is this exclusive customised aluminium box, burnished clean
of all the manufacturer's graphics and sponsorship logo crap, and as
he's such a generous soul there are always other wires trailed and
waiting. Selecting the nearest, I shook some slack into it and took
up the recovery position on the floor next to Dil. But not too
close, yeah? His room's like real cramped, you know?

I'm not
saying hardwiring is really risky or dangerous or anything, not like
crossing a dual carriageway or eating fugu fish fingers, but lying on
your side in the recovery position is definitely safest. Just in
case. One arm slightly behind your body, the other hooked up in
front, hand level with the forehead; left leg straight, right leg at
right angles to the body, hinged at the knee. The Crooked K as we
call it and God sees it. Andrena does it foetal in a nest of duvets,
but then she just would, wouldn't she? She heard someplace it's even
more fulfilling. But then what's an extra half a per cent on a
million?

For those
who've been boxed and stored in a mine or prefer sailboarding
blindfold across the Pacific or whatever, ether is the most glorious,
trackless bewilderness imaginable. No grief or germs or stressy
interfering dolts jerking you around in all directions. Just peace
and tranquility, and aeons of foreverness. On your own, maybe, or
with another mind. Or a million minds, if you can handle it, if you
are equal to all the beauty and endless chaos lying beneath its great
and holy arc.

Shame it's
totally beyond law nowadays, yeah? To have an implant, I mean, or at
least to perform the operation on someone. Because it really is a
gift. Such an incredible gift. Just think of all those who are
missing out! But with hundreds of kids already dead and thousands
persistently vegetative across this land of ours, not forgetting all
the ones across the wide wide waters, I guess it's no wonder really.

There are
lost souls, too, some say. Really. Lost souls. Wow.

Some days
it seems right and proper having it banned, other times loathsome and
small-minded. Still, none of this has stopped anyone I know;
especially not once the gene becomes your driver. No, we mustn't
forget The Gene. This is how it goes:

Day One on
God's green earth all the newborns get this test, right, which I'm
sure you know already, to determine exactly who they are. And
I do mean exactly. The test hadn't been fully developed when
I hatched out, so I had to have the needleprick when I was three or
four or so. Sometimes I fancy I can even remember it, mum taking me
there and all that, and getting bribed with the promise of a big
packet of sugar-free sweets afterwards if I was good. Anyway, this
test tells you everything about yourself, be it good, bad or
whatever. All that from just a speck of blood. Amazing.

This day
one data, once centrifuged and cultured, is output as an autorad, a
narrow strip of film banded light and dark, about twice as long as
the infant it's taken from. It's like your own unique barcode or
something. Which I suppose is precisely what it is. Most of the
bands provide info you can glean easily enough from a bathroom mirror
or a sideways glance at your parents and grandparents, your brothers
and your sisters: red eyes and hairy palms, cloven hooves and
retractable claws, yeah? Lol. But there are hundreds of lesser
groupings which underscore behaviour, demeanour, cravings,
disposition etc. And within these there are thousands of quirks and
twists yet to be extracted, let alone fully understood. Then one
day:

Trust me,
I'm a scientist!

A glass
slide is held up to the light, so to speak, and the Icarus gene is
discovered. The Icarus gene, betokening recklessness and an
overwhelming sense of invulnerability. Yeah, that's me all right.
(Ok, so they’ve got no imagination but I mean, what the hell else
could they call it?)

To the
noble professors who decoded this newest little squiggle half way
along one of our trillions of helices, the discovery was just another
tick in the genome margin. Nothing more. But oh! imagine the
unimaginable thrills when at last they identified a foolproof way of
determining whether it or some other dull brown kink was a person’s
controller gene. Now this really was a milestone. It was
also a completely new game – Mankind By Numbers – and boy, did
they love it. They spent years just studying the rules.

For the
whole of society, the whole of humanity, a great liberation was
suddenly at hand. The lab coat army marched triumphantly up to the
gates. And locked us all in.

Many years
passed before anyone realised the key had been turned the wrong way.
And during those many years, parents were told with rampant hubris
what their children’s destinies were or were very likely to be.
But they don't do it any more. Family doctors are no longer allowed
to read you your immutable genetic Tarot. Oh no. Slowly it dawned
on them just how destructive these blind revelations could be, and
how limiting rather than liberating they were.

Now we're
like back before The Epigenetic Flood or whatever. So much so that
all information on a profile remains buried – providing
your offspring is mentally and physically normal, that is. Otherwise
there comes a knock at the door, some awful and inescapable truths
are tactlessly disclosed, and years of subsidised counselling follow.
Ten times cruel it is.

Anyway,
there are now tens of millions of us right across the world who know
pretty well how our stay here is likely to end, those of us wilfully
steering our ship straight into the storm. Or onto the reefs.

But what
do we care? What do we care once Icarus takes the wheel? He won't
let go, you know. Just you try and make him!

Anyway…

It only
remained for me to consult the countback on Dil’s box. Fuck! It
still had twenty-eight earth minutes to go! How long had he been
gone? Jesus! This is one stupid, mad and fucked out bastard!

Two or
three times I wiped the jack on my sleeve, taking one last look over
my shoulder at the door as I did so. But I needn't have. Dil’s
mum is cooler than most, maybe because she's still on the young side,
and well milfy with it. Or maybe she's back on strong medication
again on account of all her, uh, issues. Whatever, LizMary never
chides us or anything. Takes the piss, mind, like she’d once
levered the doors of perception off their very hinges or something,
all by herself. As if! A tweaker when a teen, Dil once told me.
But that was then and this is now. And that's the difference between
a musket ball and a smart bomb with a moral imperative.

I laughed,
lay down and plugged in.

Convolvulus
white fluids wash over in slowest milliseconds. Never the same state
twice, no sensation duplicated. Not an experience, more a state of
being, of well-being, a happy delirium, your body abandoned on a
couple of square metres of floor someplace, anyplace really, your
mind uncaged. Equilibrium sets in, then your id and your karma do it
doggy-style for entertainment and belly laughs; vocabulary becomes
tits on a bull and no back-answers. This is the rush. All of the
brain's synapses fly open and all the crap you've ever
witnessed with your big brown eyes, and I mean every last flaky
fucking forgotten thing, a total sluice, a d&c right down to your
very lining, becomes an absurd carnival marching four abreast for an
eternal now. And then it's gone. That’s your headwaters
downloading. Next, everything from everyone else across the globe
who's tapped in at the same time as you is uploaded straight into the
vacuum of your brain. It's like a tide which has never before come
in, as if it has been waiting for you to witness its power, to give
that tide its very purpose. To scour you clean. Or so it seems.

In
waketime if we try to analyse it and speak words to one another about
the impressions we’re left with, how quickly we become unstuck.
This is definitely the weirdest stuff. Not weird because it's
surreal, which it surely is and indescribably so, but weird because
of the familiarity of all the thoughts and brain impulses, if
that's what they are. The permutations of experience are as
boundless as your average universe, yet there's a soothing
unremarkableness about it all, as if you're two and a half and in
bed, and your mother's crept in and cosied you in under a blanket of
complete understanding. There’s no monsters or evil spirits,
nothing nightmarish like that. And just as you're getting totally
blissed out, watching a hundred million worlds go by (each life is a
world, Andrena says) they dissolve forever like sugar strands dropped
into warm double cream. Sounds become kaleidoscopic, colours
polyphonic; angels come in your face, and you swear you're entering
the upgrade of Heaven it's so brilliant. Gradually, the light
shimmers with a oneness as your soul drops minutely into an ocean of
stillness, and there you remain until the countback counts back the
crore seconds until it all fades to gold.

In the
aftermath you're lucky if you're not violently sick or disabled with
a ten-hour migraine, but it truly is a cosmological kick and everyone
just knows they'll be back for more. Me? What's my
trade-off? More often than not I suffer copious nosebleeds. So it
was daft of me to lie fallow for so long with that toasted geek Dil.
He sat up, broke wind, and clambered downstairs to make us cups of
slosh with biscuits on the side, which he needn't have done because
his cups have like cracks in them. I could have waited quite happily
till I got home. I even told him so.

Anyway,
we're at school the next day and after a session like we've had the
night before, we're both feeling like Jesus and his hungry donkey
lost in the backwoods with no camping stove. Piddell, our unesteemed
ICT tutor, who is about as yesteryear as they come and I dare say
still wets his pants once every twelvemonth when he reaches that part
of the syllabus covering virtual reality, well, he starts in with the
old you-boys-have-been-up-all-night-at-the-crack-pipe malarkey,
haven’t you? He even throws in a witty little mime for good
measure. At which point everyone but everyone bursts out laughing
and I go apoplectic at the humiliating sadness of it all, whereupon
my nose responds by bursting its banks. I can do nothing as blood
soaks thickly into the sleeve of my uniform. Or gets splattered all
Jackson Pollock up the flat screen in front of me as back jerks my
head in dismay and disgust, leaving me to howl away in third degree
embarrassment rather than make any attempt to rescue my poor nose.

I can't
sit all day like that, can I, all covered in blood? So I dismiss
myself from class, my fingers already engrossed with the discharge.

Screen
wipe, wretch!

Ignoring
Piddell's protestations, I pause only on my way out to daub a
satisfying and totally improvised sticky red zero on the back of the
classroom door. Everyone understands and roars with laughter a
second time.

The look
on Dil's mandrill face is deluxe. He should share it with the world.

Chapter 4

Tuesday.
Shit. Double Geog, double Humanism, and a whole afternoon of Mixed
Sports and Gender Training. Double bollocks and pisseroo. At least
in Humanism I'll get to see Andrena, my only darling. And as we're
usually allowed to sit next to one another, we can always share a
screen. It's only faintly distracting when she digs her nails hard
as hard into the backs of my gloved hands. Come on! Everybody does
it! But we don't disrupt the class by talking or anything. Or by
snogging. No way. Za-za-za. You'd have to be really inadequate to
do that in front of everyone.

Breaktimes
are when we talk and stuff, or have Erle explain to us what failed to
sink in in class. If we're lucky we find ourselves a quiet place on
the long low wall that runs below the science block and I'll go yag
yag yag and get no word of reply from my only darling. Sometimes
Andrena will bitch about everything in her life, but usually she
stays silent. Or she’ll sneer at the other kids in the playground,
boys as well as girls. Andrena's well into sneering at the moment.
I just love watching her face when she sneers. It's like she's full
of vinegar and just can't piss it out.

But I know
what she means, where her attitude comes from. Like we're both
sixteen, yeah? (Or is she seventeen already?) So we could both go
and get married and do sex standing up and stuff – though neither
of us does, yeah? Because we're clean, right? So, we're both
sixteen and we have these like huge waves rolling deep down inside,
ideas and feelings and stuff, about life and each other and
everything you can imagine, and we're forced to hang out in a fucking
playground with all these little kids. Which is really tight.
Granted we're not dolts yet, thank God, but we're not kids anymore.
It's just that it’s a total jerk off embarrassment sometimes. Most
of the time, actually. Why can't we have some cool common room of
our own like Hayla does in the Upper? What makes them so special?
Or is that one of the poxy carrots on offer for passing all your
exams, for handing in your coursework on time or for being some kind
of perfecteen athletico hero? Admittance to a private,
pastel-coloured clubhouse so you can rub up against all the other
gems and keeners, high and dry above this insane chain-link compound
of ours, with perhaps maybe a kettle and some crappy jokey mugs and
little packets of chocolate fucking chip fucking cookies…?

All this
fresh air sucks, too. It really does. You just have to believe me.

I long to
couple up on stylish type chairs in like decent and civilized
surroundings, instead of sitting out here in the freezing cold in our
stupid fucking flappy coats. It's really degrading, you know?
Bereft of dignity. Me and Andrena, yeah? We're used to the pure
azure of our minds going on and on forever, not being stuck outside
in this greyness, suffering flattened hair and teeming little kids
with their puerile screaming football catch-me-if-you-can games.
Little kids. They need to stay in more. They really do.

For them,
seeing us together is simply a cue to skip about and chant sweet
songs of love. It drives me near to madness. But I guess that's
because they're right to eighteen decimal places. About me anyway.
Andrena? Who knows? She's like completely removed and absent
when they start up. Zips up her hood into a tube and vanishes.
Andrena says she always has so much to unravel inside her head that
mere rudeness doesn't touch her in any way whatsoever. Sometimes she
says this isn't really her anyway, this blob sat on a school
wall going yag yag yag with me, giving away her sandwiches to the
lardish kids and stuff.

She's not
a blob, yeah? Far from it. But that's what she says she is.
Sometimes I think if it wasn't for the ether, she'd be all alone.
Maybe in an urn. And I think all those corn syrup love songs the
little kids pick up and spit out don't get to her because she
doesn't, you know – she doesn't like – she doesn't love –
because she's a nihilistic black haired bitch and I! Love! Her!
Loads. Okay? Okay. That’s all you need to know. Who says it has
to work both ways?

So there
we sit on our long low wall, all hands in pockets not touching or
anything, just brimful of understanding and empathy. It's bliss in
waketime, it really is. Not that I'd be so dim as to tell Erle and
Dil my truest feelings because they'd only tar and feather me with my
own embarrassment. So as long as there's no drecky true love cipher
for anyone to home in on, it's clean and it's cool, yeah?

Thank
sweetest little Jesus in his Mother's cradling arms for friends,
that's what I say. Erle is eazzy and so is Dil, for the most part.
They're both wireweeds, like Andrena and me. I guess that's why we
lock together so well, why we're so hard to pull apart. It’s a
kind of closed system, yeah?

I suppose
there must be others in our school who fly by night just like we do,
only they must be able to bury their dark little secret far better
than we can. (Like everybody knows.) In the ether you can do that –
hide, I mean – just as easy as turn yourself right inside out all
beautiful pearly pink. Sometimes I see snatches of faces – only
they're not really faces, more like the insides of faces –
and I'm sure I've seen them around and about. I precognise
them, if that's an allowable word. Like mind-rolling. Which is
another of those impressions me and Andrena try to make sense of
every now and then; you know, that sensation where echo and shadow
touch upon you without anything tangible ever revealing itself. That
and the sound of our own reflections…

I've
noticed something else lately, too: parents and tutors are beginning
to pry more and more. Way before they even think to speak, I see
questions forming in their unknowing eyes.

What do
you do in limbo, Cal? What is it that you do in the ether?

Wrong
verb, I say: I am in limbo. In the ether we are. The verb is
to be. There's no need to over-complicate it. (Besides, it's
paradise not limbo.)

Relatives
have started asking questions, too, which is a complete pain. I
sense alarm in their voices.

What is it
that beguiles we liberteens so? (There is an overwhelming need to
know.)

Finally,
all that bad biased news has penetrated, down the daytime co-ax into
their cosy homes for two. I try putting them off as best I can. I
mean, I don't want them knowing, now do I? It isn't really
theirs to delight in. So they can jog right on, as dad would
say. After all, it's only bits, I say, deflecting, just
streams of 1's and 0's as long as eternity and then some. (Blank
looks.) It's just binary. (More blank looks.) Surely they know
that much?

No fucking
understanding at all, not a single one of them. This is my only
reassurance. Non-liners. I revel in their uneasiness, their exile.
Besides, if they are that curious they'll try it for themselves,
won't they? Ha!

Sometimes
we actually speak binary to one another, Erle, Dil, Andrena and I.
It helps things remain special and hidden. Better than teenage
hyper-mumble it is. Liberteens can speak bine incredibly
fast. So fast it becomes a codified blur. Most kids can deliver a
burst if they have to. Up to a point.

Little
kids in the mall looped me with a string later that very afternoon,
so I blanked them deliberate to see what the follow-up might be. But
it wasn’t much. In a nutshell, they called me '0' (zero), most
likely because I was still in school uniform and maybe looking a bit
miz and stuff without Andrena hunched up next to me, so I couldn't
really blame them, could I? But honestly, me? A zero?
You know, a zero, somebody who knows nothing. Nothing about
anything. Not one single stunning thing. Someone who isn't there.
A total shell, a hollow of a person just waiting to be filled in,
right up to their very lips with regurgitations and other people’s
ucky stuff I just don't want to even begin thinking about. You know,
waketime stuff. All the shadows between our dreams. Anyway, I
wasn't standing for that, you know, being called less than one. So,
with great ceremony, I removed my earbugs and discharged a zip-load
of bine so fast they couldn't keep up or translate or even appreciate
the majesty of my insult.

Fractionally
after finishing they handed me three fingers reversed of immediate
respect. Yes, each and every one of them. (Three fingers reversed
and spread wide apart looks like W-for-weird, but really it means
one-one-one i.e. 7; g is the seventh letter of the
alphabet, and g is for God, yeah? [Spooky how two
fingers parted works out to be one-one-zero, i.e. 6, i.e. f
, i.e. fuck off. – The two spare fingers and the thumb overlap to
form the zero, in case you're like wondering.] And the upraised
lonesome finger is more than capable of speaking for itself).
Anyway, I gave them a look of contentment and serenity and left it at
that. No need to bow or anything. Not to little kids. My
disdain is more than enough.

You can
always tell if someone's hardwired by the speed at which they string
bine. Like this is totally laborious, you know? I mean
language, mere sub-dimensional words fit only for molluscs from the
deepest of seas. Truly. Just remember I'm only doing it as a
colossal favour so as not to leave you washed up on the beach all
wasted and lost and looking for a comb or something. I'll keep it
simple. Perhaps you can pretend I'm some horse-faced teacher you
wish you'd forgotten and flushed away.

Let's
start with numbers.

In binary,
there's only 0's and 1's. Nothing else. There is no '2' or '3' or
'4' or anything flash or exponential like that. Just '0' and '1' –
on and off, open and closed, light and dark. 0 is zero and 1 is one:
with me so far? Because this is where it starts getting complicated.
'2' is expressed as '10' – that's one-zero not ten,
dumb arse - because in binary you count not in units, tens,
hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands and so on, but in units, twos,
fours, eights, sixteens, thirty-twos... yeah? With me? So '2' is
one two and zero units, '10', one-zero. Little
number '3' is '11': one-one: one two and one
unit. '4' is '100': one-zero-zero: one four, zero
twos and zero units. Got it? So '5' is...? Okay! Okay! My
sister (my blister, my cyst) says I can patronise the
pants off anyone. Sorry, yeah? Anyway, if you can understand Roman
numerals and all its myxomatosis, binary is a piece of cake. Chimps
learned binary long ago, I dare say.